I’m aware that the previous post relied heavily on Amazon for accessing freebies. For those of you who’d rather not use the Amazon platform you can access more free eBooks from the following sources. Just click the link to go straight through. Google Play also offer free books but no easy way of honing in on them. I suggest if you see a freebie elsewhere then search on Google Play if that’s your preferred purchasing point.
I need to clarify here, that for the most part, the sites listed are offering free and discounted e-books, often just for Kindle, but not exclusively. They are all free to sign up to and don’t involve you accepting ARC’s (Advance Review Copies) which as the name implies means you should be offering a review in return for your ‘free’ book. I’m concentrating on the ones I use the most. Feel free to let me know if there are better ones that I’m not aware of.
Index
Publisher and Genre Discount Sites
KindofBook
KindofBook is a platform for free and greatly discounted Kindle eBooks, largely because the Amazon Kindle is the market leader in the eBook reader sector. In addition, these eBooks can be read on any computer, tablet or smartphone.
It offers the following benefits:
- The best new eBook deals daily: Every day, we search all available Kindle eBooks with major falls in prices and provide a daily selection of the best deals. Usually, these deals are time-limited, meaning that they expire after a few days (sometimes even after a few hours). Therefore we recommend that you subscribe to our customizable newsletter, so that you will be guaranteed not to miss, any current, short term top offers.
- Access to additional free books: Often there are free eBook deals in our daily selection that are being reserved for our signed up users.
- You are an author or publisher?: Then you can inform us about your ebook deals and we will take it into consideration to include them in our daily selection.
What is their selection criteria?
- Price: Books must be free or at least 40% discounted compared to the price of the last days and weeks. In addition, with a few exceptions, we also do not provide books that cost more than 3 pounds. Most are even significantly less.
- Quality: The eBooks need to have a minimum rating, a minimum number of rankers, have a minimum length and basically provide an impression of quality. The exact criteria can vary slightly according to daily offer.
- Genre Mix: We try to offer you the broadest possible selection daily. Since we have no control over what books are reduced in price, it may be that we need to make a one-sided selection on some days. Romance novels and thrillers are incidentally the most common genres and are therefore generally offered the most often.
- Seldom repetitions: If an eBook has already been posted, the earliest reselection date is in six months. From time to time we make an exception, for example, when a well-selling book becomes free of cost, although we have reported it as a reduced price a few weeks ago.
Why are the eBooks free of charge or greatly reduced in price?
There are many different reasons to explain this. Often, authors or publishers want to achieve a higher sales rankings or they have a new book published, which they want to promote, by offering another book for free. After a few days, or if the eBook has reached a certain ranking, it will usually revert back to its original price.
BookBub
BookBub is a free service that helps you discover books you’ll love through deals, handpicked recommendations, and updates from authors. In addition to Amazon, it also includes Apple, Google and Kobo.
BookBub notifies you about free and deeply discounted ebook recommendations selected by an expert editorial team, from bestsellers to hidden gems. You choose the genres you’d like to get notified about — with categories ranging from mysteries to romance to cookbooks.
BookBub features books ranging from top-tier publishers to critically acclaimed independent authors.
BookBub also notifies you about discounts, new releases, and pre-orders from your favorite authors. You choose the authors you want to follow, and they’ll alert you when they have book news to share.
eReaderIQ
eReaderIQ is a price tracking service for Kindle books and is one that I heavily rely on for tracking the titles I’m interested in. They do list free and 99p books but you need to visit the site to check for these. You can search by genre, book length, popularity as well as how long it’s been free/reduced.
Where I make the most use of it is for price notifications on specific titles I’m waiting to drop in price, or for authors that I collect. You can either add these directly from the eReaderIQ site or take advantage of the tracking tools they provide that can be directly linked via a chrome extension to Amazon. This means when you’re looking at a Kindle title on Amazon you can see it’s price history and also track future price drops. You can ask to be notified when it either drops by a certain amount or reaches a specific price. This is either a monetary amount or a %age, but you decide what that amount is. Once your title reaches your designated figure you’ll get an email notification. this is how I get so many of my 99p books. I track them. Many of the books I have listed (apparently over 1,000) will never fall to 99p and that’s fine I’m not expecting them too, this is just a way of not missing those that do. Especially when in some cases, the drop can be last for just a few hours. Either way you won’t miss out on a wanted title dropping in price.
I really recommend you have a look and familiarise yourself with how it works as this is a really useful site.
BookRunes and BookSends
BookRunes and Booksends both provide a daily email listing free and discounted books from your chosen genres/categories. The reason I’ve put them together is that their offerings are pretty similar, but they might also include a title the other doesn’t so you might want to sign up for both. They link to Amazon.com so if it’s a title you fancy simply search for it on the UK site. You’ll usually find it’s also reduced, but not always.
Publisher and Genre Discount Sites
This is not an all inclusive listing as by default it is dictated by the genres and books that I prefer to read. However, what it should make you aware of is to check whether the publishers in genres you prefer offer newsletters that will highlight current offers as well as searching out listings in the genres you read.
Avon
Avon is the commercial fiction division of HarperCollins which publishes predominantly crime, thrillers, suspense, feel-good general fiction, and historical fiction. Sign up to Avon’s newsletter here to stay up to date with all of their latest releases, news, exclusive deals and competitions.
Bloodhound
Bloodhound began life as publishers of commercial crime fiction and psychological thrillers but more recently have broadened their range to encompass romance, general commercial fiction. You can sign up here for the latest news and offers.
Boldwood
Boldwood is an award-winning independent, global fiction publishing house launched in February 2019, with its first titles published in August 2019. It publishes commercial fiction across crime and thriller, women’s fiction, romance, historical fiction, saga and reading group fiction.
Sign up to the newsletter here for weekly eBook deals, free books, competitions and new releases.
BookDrop
BookDrop is brought to you by one of the UK’s largest publishers, Hachette UK. From bestsellers, crime and thriller and contemporary fiction to young adult, non-fiction and cookery, whatever you’re in the mood for, they’ve got it covered.
You can either sign up to their newsletter here, for handpicked offers or, better still, you can search Amazon directly for all their offers via their dedicated Amazon store page here.
Bookouture
Bookoutoure is a division of Hachette UK publishing bestselling commercial fiction. You can sign up to their newsletter here to get the latest deals.
Dead Good
Dead Good, is an example of a genre based listing, it describes itself as the home of killer crime books, TV and film.
Established in October 2012, Dead Good is dedicated to discovering, sharing and recommending thrilling crime. Whether you’re on the hunt for an intriguing mystery, an action-packed thriller or a creepy psychological drama, we’re here to keep you in the loop.
Sign up to the newsletter here to get weekly eBook deals, recommendations and giveaways straight to your inbox.
Joffe Books
Joffe are an established, award winning Indie publisher with an extensive backlist of titles across the genres of crime and mystery, sagas, historical and romance. In addition to this they are also nurturing debut novelists and attracting established authors. They recently acquired Lume Books and Choc Lit, the latter being an award-winning publisher of romance and women’s fiction.
You can sign up to their newsletter here for a weekly free book as well as 99p deals and other offers.
One More Chapter
One More Chapter, a division of Harper Collins, claim to be the number one stop for page-turning books across a range of genres from romance, through crime to historical.
The weekly newsletter features eBook deals, up to date information about our weekly live book clubs and much more! You can sign up here
Page Turners
Page Turners is the newsletter offering from Penguin books, a publisher who should need no introduction . In addition to covering new releases, and exclusive news it offers 99p Kindle deals. You can sign up here
Pillow Talk Books
Another genre based daily newsletter (see here) which as the title suggests focuses on romance – across all it’s varied tropes and genres.
Author newsletters
Last, but not least, take advantage of signing up to author’s newsletters. this is a direct way of hearing from authors you enjoy and they will often highlight offers. I get a lot of free books this way, but I also appreciate that the market for self published romance authors in the US is huge so there’s a need to get themselves noticed more with promo’s and freebies.
o-o-O-o-o
So I think that’s enough for today. I’m sure there’ll be something I’ve forgotten but I can maybe mop up at the end once I’ve covered off the other topics I want to cover.
Hope this proves useful and I’ll see you soon for Part 3
Happy reading!!
